by Peter Watts
Prognosis: Ultimate mortality rate among infected human hosts is believed to be 100%; while not all known victims have yet died, none are known to have recovered. We are unable to provide a cure at this time. The relative resistance of related primate species does, however, suggest that some form of gene therapy may prove effective. This avenue is under intense investigation, although it is currently hampered by a lack of funding and personnel.
Conclusions: GrEp Ag-01 presents a paradox. Its extreme host specificity points inevitably to an engineered bioweapon specifically intended for human targets. However, it is not contagious among humans; to date, the only observed means of infection is via direct contact with a viable spore. This is a profoundly ineffective strategy for wide-scale attack, one which limits human casualties to within a few kilometers of the spires themselves.
It is not plausible that a species with Charybdis’s obvious capabilities would commit such an elementary oversight. We propose two hypotheses to account for this discrepancy:
1. The enemy is solely interested in establishing local control, and has no interest in expanding beyond Manhattan (and perhaps its immediate environs);
2. The bioweapon is still under development, and the enemy is not yet ready for a wide-scale release. This would suggest that the Ceph are practitioners of the “Precautionary Principle,” and do not wish to globally release an agent that has not been thoroughly field-tested. In this case the limitations we have thus far observed would only be temporary, and the appearance of a truly infectious variant would herald the end of the prototyping stage.
It is our opinion that the second hypothesis is the more plausible of the two. We note, however, that our opinions arise from a distinctly human perspective, while the beings we are trying to second-guess are anything but. Perhaps this offers some grounds for hope.
* In vitro testing is ongoing. Dr. Strahan has submitted an expedited request for additional live specimens across a range of primate species, and for a temporary waiver of the board’s Experimental Ethics rules.
CRASH
Oh, Roger, the things I have seen.
Cities turned into swamps. Oceans on fire. Mobs so desperate to get out of the zone they barely even notice the razor wire slicing them open, so desperate for even a chance at clean water or a mouthful of freeze-dried Spirulina they’ll scale livewire fences, jerking like marionettes. I saw a woman’s hair catch fire halfway up and she just kept going because really, what did she have to lose? I’ve fed mass graves so big you could barely see the other side, so big you could see them from fucking orbit.
And then they sent me to Manhattan.
In one way, you know, it was almost a relief. To be picking on something your own size for a change, you know? Something that could fight back. We were the underdogs. We’d probably all end up dead or worse, but if we didn’t—if we actually survived, or even won—well, maybe for the first time in our lives we could feel good about winning. We were fighting a superior force for a change. We weren’t mowing down refugees.
Except when we were.
I remember running across my first—mop-up. Containment. Whatever word they used to whitewash the whole massacre thing. I’m climbing down off the rooftops, coming down a fire escape into this little cul-de-sac off William Street and there’s a pit dug into the road, lined with PVC. A couple of mercs are standing there shooting random civilians, and the cloak gets me close enough to hear them talking. They’re yucking it up because they don’t even have to go out hunting, you know, the civvies come to them, all of ’em heading the same way like salmon swimming upstream to sp—
What?
I don’t give a flying fuck if they were infected. They were civilians.
Yeah, that’s how they always justify it, isn’t it? Quarantine, protecting the population, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. All that shit. Let me tell you, these assholes were not racked by remorse over the necessary evil they were committing. They were laughing. They were using those poor bastards for target practice.
’Course, you’re trained that way. It’s an old trick. Never call them civilians, never learn their names. It’s tough to kill a fellow human being. In fact we make it a point to never kill human beings. We kill niggers and ragheads and terrorists instead. You know what they call infected civilians down in the zone, Roger? Pizza Pockets. Pukeheads. Because of the way they explode when you shoot them. Their insides are all pulpy, like rotten fruit.
When I saw those first few victims I assumed it was just some random alien fungus or something, you know, like that flesh-eating disease. But it’s more than that. It doesn’t just eat you, it doesn’t just turn you into a walking mass of tumors. First it reprograms you. It gives you purpose. Something to live for, something to die for. Some of those guys, you’d swear that getting raptured was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Sometimes I almost found myself feeling envious.
Not everyone down there was CELL, of course. There were some good guys as well. Every now and then I’d see MPs or medics from the Red Cross trying to intervene, Dude, it’s a meat-grinder in there, you keep going that way Squiddie will have you for appetizers. But the infectees, they didn’t care. They wanted to meet the Squids, they wanted to be consumed, it was like their own personal ticket to sit at the right hand of Jesus H. Christ in the Great Hereafter. I even saw a couple of Bible-thumpers, they snuck into the zone on some kind of self-appointed missionary patrol. It was almost funny, watching them try to unsave all these poor doomed bastards who’d got to “Heaven” before them. But those CELL goons, man, they weren’t interested in saving souls. All they were after was something to kill that wouldn’t fight back.
What do you think I did? We’re supposed to protect civilians, right? That’s the official job description at least. So I did my job. I blew those assholes away with extreme fucking prejudice, and I’d do it again.
Chain of command, huh?
Is that the best you’ve got?
Anyway I keep on keeping on, closing on Gould, closing on Gould. He says it’s safer in the subway so I give it a shot, but it does not go well. Not all of the infected are pilgrims, you know, not all of them have seen the light. Some of them are sane enough to be scared shitless by what’s happening to them, some of them just need a dark place to hide and rot away. The subways are full of them: sobbing, suffering, telling anyone who’ll listen that it’s not that bad, they’re getting better, that they’ll be right as rain this time tomorrow. Some of them look almost as healthy as you; some aren’t much more than gurgling puddles of slime. And those scuttling things are everywhere, those tick-things I ran into back in the decon tunnel. They clatter around on jointed silver legs and jab those needle snouts into the bodies. They must inject some kind of acid or digestive enzyme because the stuff they suck back out looks more like pus and semen than blood and guts. It splatters like pus when you squash them. They’re easy enough to kill, the repulsive little fuckers. You crush them with your bare hands but there are so many of them. There’s just no point.
I’ve had enough of that after about five minutes, take the next exit, climb back into the first daylight I can find. I end up on a pedestrian skywalk connecting a couple of office towers at the second floor. I’m about halfway across when I see a squad of CELLulites charging up the street below, waving their guns; I’m cloaked and down on my belly by the time they open fire; I’ve backed off a good ten meters before I realize they’re not even shooting at me.
And then something smashes through the walkway and I’m down on the street just like that and I stop worrying about the fucking mercs altogether.
My whole BUD’s flashing red. I’m flat on my back and the whole damn suit’s seized up. I’ve taken some kind of hit but nobody’s bothering to close for the kill; I’m nothing but collateral. The actual target screams past not ten meters overhead and I’d know what it was even if I wasn’t staring right up at it, even if I was blind, because I’ve only heard that sound once b
efore: not eight hours ago, swimming for my life while my whole squad got cut down around me.
Same two glowing hoops sticking out the sides. Must be some kind of antigravity thing, lift elements. Two rows of modules in between, about the size and shape of industrial cement mixers. Cylinder-cone things, lined up like eggs in a carton. The ship’s staggering through the airspace, weaving and wobbling, and part of that might be evasive maneuvers but I don’t care how alien this bird is, you can tell it’s wounded. It might as well be skywriting HOLY SHIT I’M FUCKED in black smoke.
And here comes the mofo that’s kicked its ass and its one of ours, it’s a goddamn Apache. A 64D, I think, not even bleeding-edge. I mean, this is a flying saucer we’re talking about—built by creatures from another fucking solar system—and it’s getting its ass handed to it by a bunch of apes in a ten-year-old helicopter. Fuck yeah. Somehow it’s got its nose back up, it’s climbing again, it almost clears the building down the street but not quite: skips off the edge like a stone on water, bounces back into the sky, but there are three Apaches on its tail now and they’re not giving up. One scores a direct hit just as the alien arcs away behind an office tower and I think that’s it, end of show—but a few seconds later it punches back into view, right through the building, leaves a glowing hole four stories high. I can see right through it to the cloud bank on the other side. This ship’s not going anywhere but down. It exits stage left, down some city canyon a few blocks ahead. Big orange flash. Smoke billows around the corner.
It’s like watching someone shoot down an X-35 with a slingshot.
Gould’s voice comes back to me as my suit reboots. “Did you fucking see that? I swear, it came down not five blocks from you!” He sounds like an eight-year-old girl who’s just gotten a pony for her birthday. “Dude, you do realize what this means, right? No one ever shot one of these things down before! This is our chance! This is it! There’ll be—I mean—let me think, just let me think …”
I do a little thinking myself. According to GPS, Gould’s in a warehouse all the way over on the East River. It’s just barely possible that he might have looked out his window and seen a tiny distant dot fall out of the sky—but how the hell does he know where I am in relation to it?
This isn’t just a comm link. Either this Gould fucker has access to high-rez realtime satcam surveillance, or the N2’s putting out some kind of homing signal. I wonder if it’s encrypted. I wonder if Lockhart knows the key.
“—to jump on this,” Gould’s saying. “Extraction can wait—go get me some samples. This could be it, man: a shot at rolling back the spore, maybe even the whole invasion. I’ll hold for you here. But move your ass. Lockhart’s going to have CELL swarming all over that crash site in nothing flat.”
I can still hear helicopters buzzing from somewhere in the streets ahead. That little blue hexagon that was pointing the way to Gould’s lab jumps west, miraculously recalibrated to the bearing of the crash site. I couldn’t find Gould now if my life depended on it; it was so easy just following the waypoints I never bothered to memorize the route.
I may be the one moving these arms and legs, but somehow Gould and the N2 are the ones deciding where they take me. And I’m starting to feel a little like a passenger in my own skin, if you know what I mean.
But you bounce pretty high after cheating death, Roger. Just a few hours back I knew I was dying, I could feel myself dying down to the last cell: no denials, no reprieve, this is it, dude. And when you come to those kind of terms and then come out the other side—look death in the face and beat the fucker against impossible odds, you feel—
Invulnerable. That’s the word. Invulnerable.
After all, Prophet took a shell to the chest wearing these threads, and he stayed standing. So yeah, I’m feeling like the last son of Krypton, and there’s a crashed alien ship just a few blocks away. Who wouldn’t want to check that out?
I know I’m being led by the nose. But the truth is I’d have probably headed over to take a look anyway.
Manhattan’s been carved into a jigsaw.
It’s not the aliens’ doing. It’s not even the random chaos of collapsing buildings and seismic tremors. It’s us. Ten thousand slabs of concrete have been slotted together and laid across the cityscape like interlocking dominoes ten meters high, and every last one has CELL stamped across it in big black letters. The whole zone’s been partitioned into a hundred irregular cookie-cutter shapes. The last time I saw this much cement in such a small area, it was being used to keep Israelis and Palestinians from tearing each other’s throats out.
This particular barricade cuts right across the middle of Broad Street. The nearest storm-sewer grating is about twenty meters back from a massive corrugated gate topped by a scrolling marquee that endlessly repeats LOWER MANHATTAN SEALED OFF in block capitals. I pry off the grille and drop below the street; five minutes later I’m cloaked and flattened against a savings and loan on East Houston, leaning around the corner into the sound of helicopters and idling APCs.
Way to go on the whole partitioned-containment thing, guys.
I think this used to be some kind of open-air plaza. Right now it’s a smoking hole, a ragged cutaway model ripped open to show the cracked stacked levels of an underground parking garage. If there’s a ship buried down there under all those cement floes, it’s too deep for me to make out. I can see three of those cylindrical pods scattered around, though: half buried in the street, face-planted in an urban flower patch, taking the absolute piss out of a dozen tables on a café patio. Strip away some of that weird Ceph chrome and they almost could have come off the backs of cement trucks.
A helicopter drifts back and forth over the center of the tableau. I see a couple of APCs parked in front of a deli, and over across the crater half a dozen ammo and supply crates have been stacked along the wall of the elevator hutch that must have been the main pedestrian parkade access before the Ceph pioneered the whole open-access approach. Maybe a dozen CELLulites wander the perimeter. A few more hump kit from the APCs to the elevator cache.
My cloak’s almost drained. I pull back around the corner as Gould natters on about checking the pods. “We’re looking for tissue samples, dead crew.”
Yeah, and the couple of dozen assorted mercs over there are looking for me, even with a flying saucer buried under their feet: “Keep your eyes peeled for that Nanosuit asshole. The way they’re talking, he’s more trouble than the Ceph.”
I cloak up, cross the ten meters to the OVERPRICED PARKING: IN ONLY ramp, hop the guardrail, and drop down behind the interlocked front ends of a Taurus and a Malibu that couldn’t seem to agree on traffic flow. I risk decloaking, let the charge rebuild while unsuspecting uniforms above my head fill the air with chatter.
“You picking anything up on the scanner?”
“Nah, looks like they ejected before impact. We’re just waiting for the cleanup crew.”
“If they ejected, where the hell did they go?”
“Good question.”
It is, too. I add it to the list as I recloak and start down the ramp; if the pods are a bust, maybe I can sneak into the crater from one of the garage levels. By the time the money shot comes I’m so far down that I almost miss it:
“Christ, that thing’s buried deep. Only way down is through the elevator shaft.”
Oh.
So the good news is, there may be a way to get Gould his samples: Could be it, man, a shot at rolling back the spore, maybe even the whole invasion. Rah.
Bad news is, it’s on the far side of the plaza in the middle of a crowd of trigger-happy mercs stationed right next to a fresh stock of ammunition, who have orders to shoot me on sight.
Worst news, though, is that I’m hearing at least four sets of boots approaching the bottom of the ramp ahead of me, and there’s no fucking way I can get all the way back up before my cloak runs dry.
I love it when the number of options dwindles to one. Really speeds up the decision-making process.
They hear me before they see me; the cloak is good, but it doesn’t mask the sound of boots charging down a concrete ramp at thirty klicks an hour. They stop talking, their guns come up, and suddenly I’m right there, laying shotgun blasts into all that Kevlar, bringing the Marshal down like a club on those shiny gray helmets, grabbing one of them by the throat and watching her sail through space until a convenient support pylon takes her from sixty to zero in no seconds.
Shouts from deeper within the garage. Panicked calls for back-up on comm. I’m coming for them. They know it.
But I’m not. I recloak, swap the Marshal out for a recently orphaned assault rifle and head back up the ramp. Strength is amped so I’m moving fast, but between that and the cloak every capacitor in the suit’s gonna run dry in about three seconds. Make that two: I pull a boosted jump over the reinforcements clattering down the ramp, six eager little sociopaths don’t see me coming and don’t see me go but that last mighty leap took me down to the fumes and I materialize from thin air as I pass above their heads. I don’t think they saw that I hope they didn’t see that, their eyes were down and focused on the forward charge, but no time to look it’s all in the past and I’m rising up to ground level now, I’ve got a chopper overhead and a whole shitload of hostiles coming around that crater (two, four, seven, eight, nine targets SECOND tells me, and lays neat little ranges and targeting triangles over each). I deke and I duck but it’s not enough to keep me from taking hits; and even though the suit can handle them it just kills the capacitor feed, the power bar stutters to a crawl on its way up the recharge trail.